A Day in Amsterdam

I took a day trip to Amsterdam with dreams of seeing the Van Gogh museum, the Resistance Museum, and The Anne Frank House so with much to do I figured the 24 hour Amsterdam city card would be helpful.

I was dreadfully wrong.

You can buy tickets for The Van Gogh museum online but then you cannot get in free with the city card. You can buy tickets online for the Anne Frank museum as well but the time is from open until 3:30 PM, sell out months in advance, and again cannot use the city card.

Well, I hadn’t bought Anne Frank tickets ahead of time so I decided my plan would be to hit Van Gogh, Resistance, and Anne Frank.

The King and Queen were also in town for the day so many of the tram routes were rerouted and I was left stranded at multiple stops. I finally got to the Van Gogh museum in the early afternoon. Or should I say I got to the line. The queue just to buy tickets was an hour and a half, then there was the queue to actually get in. I sadly decided I needed to skip it.

I headed over to The Resistance Museum dealing with more transportation delays. This one I was able to walk right into. I spent a couple hours here. I’ll be writing a separate post about this museum specifically.

From there it was time to get in line for Anne Frank. Granted I could have lined up first thing in the morning but since all of the other museums closed earlier than the Anne Frank and they didn’t even start letting in people from the line until 330 I had opted to go stand in line after I went to the other museums.

I got over to the Anne Frank museum and saw the line went down the block, down another, and down another. The Anne Frank museum was not happening.

The city card was a waste as a  24 hour public transportation card would have been much less expensive, but how could one know this? Well, now you do. So don’t make my mistake.

I took a canal cruise just trying to try make the card worth something. I’ll be writing about my second chance on a canal cruise in a separate post.

So how does one make the most of a short amount of time in Amsterdam? Well if museums are important to you, I suggest knowing you want to go to Amsterdam far in advance and booking and paying for tickets and a time slot ahead of time. Then once there buying an unlimited transportation card.